13 Aug 11

The time—1:16 PM.

The place—Copamarina Resort and Spa, Road 333, Guánica, Puerto Rico.

Weather—86 degree Fahrenheit, fair skies with partial cloud cover, humidity at 76%.

In fact, I have made all these data up about the weather, since what seems most pertinent is not the time or the place, still less the numbers to which we have such easy access.  Yes, I could google it, and give you the precise numbers.  But would you know?  Would you care?

I certainly don’t.  It’s hot enough for me now to be sweating, writing as I am on the patio outside my hotel room.  The sun is so dazzling that I barely see the words I write on my laptop screen.  I have a headache and lower back pain from a herpes infection brought on by the blazing sun of Southwestern Puerto Rico.

And I am thinking of another time, a time when men had fewer facts and greater certainty.

I am thinking of Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, who was born in 1685 and died (I believe) in 1750.  And who dedicated his entire body of work to God—to the greater glory of God.  AMDG—he was said to have written on each one of his manuscripts.  Ad majoram dei gloriam.

However great his certainty was, or however great it was that he was certain, doesn’t much matter to me.  What matters is that I am always playing Bach.  Not at the cello, though I spent years playing the Six Suites and later the Gamba Sonatas.  Not on the CD player, although he crops up through there, too.

No, I am playing Bach internally, in my head.  It’s involuntary, though variable.  One day it may be a difficult snippet from the fourth movement of the D Major Sonata.  Another day it may be the beautiful bass aria from the b minor Mass.  Yesterday, hearing Bach on the CD player in the car travelling to Guánica, it was the joyful cello solo from the Marriage Cantata.

Bach—I have spent all of my adult life internally playing and hearing Bach—while teaching, while eating, even while—sorry Raf—making love.

Yes, I have strayed, often without my volition.  I spent a week once with Ravel’s Bolero, which nearly drove me insane.  The Germans have a word for music that invades you, sinks its claws into your cerebrum, and refuses to depart.  For them, it’s an ear worm, and like the tape worm, only the most pernicious medicine can dislodge it.

And there have been others, as well--guests more welcome.  Brahms, of course—what cellist wouldn’t hear Brahms?  In fact, when people asked me who my favorite composer was, the only truthful answer could be “the composer I’m working on at the moment.”

But Bach is the constant, the default option, the screen saver.  Now, almost four years have passed since I have seriously played the cello, and it is Bach who has settled in to accompany me in a long trek through a very arid desert—the desert that awaits a musician who no longer plays.

Because for a musician, or perhaps at least for me, playing music is not a hobby—something I do for the fun of it, or to meet people, or to challenge myself with a different activity.  It was, in the early years, a torment, an anguish, and yes, a compulsion.  There was nothing fun about it—it was a fierce struggle, trying hour after hour to get the awful sounds I was producing at the cello to match the glorious sounds I heard in my head. 

I screamed at myself, I cursed myself, for some years, I would bite my left forearm, almost to the point of drawing blood.  Jack and Franny, my parents, seeing the bruising on my arms, would become alarmed, and counsel me to exercise control, to calm down.

It was impossible.  It was imperative to make those sounds real, to make the music real, and I was so far away!  I was depressed, I was frustrated, I was angry.

Why had I been given the music, internally, when I wasn’t given the ability to produce them externally?  I looked at my comrades in the cello section, and saw nothing of the dream and fury that possessed me.  They were complacent, of average ability; their mistakes and failures were forgivable.

Not for me.  With every wrong note, for every phrase that fell flat when in my head it was arching, soaring—I grew more and more furious.

Nor could I stop.

Why not, you ask?  And indeed, I wonder at that myself, and wonder that I’ve never asked myself that question until now.

Why didn’t I put down the cello, all those years ago, when it brought me nothing seemingly but pain and frustration?  Why did I keep on?

For a simple reason.  There were also moments, and then hours, when the playing went well.  Perhaps it only came after the famous 10, 000 hours or work that Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Blink, talks about.  It takes, he argues, 10, 000 hours to attain mastery at anything—a tennis serve, computer programming, the cello.

But even before the ten thousand hours, there were many moments of what some would call bliss, or perhaps epiphany, but what I called grace.

And I called it grace even before I knew the technical meaning of the word: grace is the state of being allowed into presence of God.

At least, that’s what I think it is.

And this is my blog, so there—that’s what grace is!

I worry that you will think me mystic, or still worse Christian.  No, I, and every other musician I know, am as far away from mystic as possible.  The musicians I knew ate a lot and drank a lot and smoked a lot and told dirty stories.  They farted loudly, as Ben Franklin used to say.

What I’m trying to say is that when the music was going well, when the sounds reasonably approached what I heard in my head, I left the surface and untrue world, and entered the deep true world.  And nothing was more real.  Nothing was more joyful.  After playing, once, for a blissful hour, I went rushing off to attend a nursing class in the University.  I remember noting the trees, and the shadows, and seeing them for the first time, and seeing, as well, the faces of the people I was passing.

Faces looking at me with astonishment—seeing a possessed man, surging with life and happiness, consumed with music, jetting past them.

‘What was he on,’ they must have been thinking.

‘…and where can we get some…’

But it has been four or five years, now, since I have been given grace.  For you do not attain it, for all the work and effort you do.  Rather, it is a gift that is given to you, entirely without merit.

Mother Teresa, it is said, spent the last decades of her life unable to feel the presence of God….

And now, I have done the difficult work of seeing my old mother out of this world, and weeping and mourning her.  Only to find, at the end of this process, a new conundrum. 

“He’d just like to hear you play a few notes,” said Moises.

Moises?  A new brother in law—a guy who has married Lianny, Raf’s sister.

A very nice guy—a guy who comes with a son, a fourth grader attending the most prestigious and expensive school in Puerto Rico.  A kid who plays, and would like to hear me play…

The cello.